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South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

thehill.com

471–480 of 521 posts

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a guy named Danny many years ago. He was one of the smartest programmers I'd ever met. Not only did he write great code, but he also always maintained an excellent connection to the his customers who would use the programs he wrote. This was in a hospital. Personally, he was kind, generous, excellent family man. He never really talked too much about politics, didn't care too much for it. He also helped…

> It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer. You're applying your view of the world to him. You're also condemning him in your mind. How about you do this instead: you know he's a smart, honest person. Listen to his argument, see where he's coming from, and try to understand _why_ he choose that conclusion. Nothing is all cut and dry.…

> Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.

I completely agree. All 'sides' are greatly over-reacting to this and most everything else. Yes, this is a very serious situation, and requires serious and well considered discussions and actions.

A great way to get groups of people who are naturally somewhat suspicious of government mandated activities, like wearing a mask, to never ever consider wearing a mask is to over-act and react irrationally. It's a pretty miserable, self-sustaining cycle.

Having said that:

> You're applying your view of the world to him.

You wrote that in response to my statement:

> > It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.

As stated, I was talking about a belief that Covid-19 was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government to help Joe Biden get elected.

That's Alex Jones level bullshit.

It doesn't break my heart to see someone I care about having a nuanced, non 'party-line' view of this whole situation. That's healthy.

To believe that people who are actually dying of Covid-19 aren't actually dying of Covid-19 is another matter entirely.

> You're also condemning him in your mind.

Not in the slightest. If you note my other comments, you will see that I'm not condemning anybody. I know that every one of us is subject to and impacted by different kinds of irrational thinking.

Reading your links, I don't agree with all of your conclusions, but that's fine. Like you, I "continually reevaluating the information".

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#472

My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August. We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit. In Vegas the concern for masks started to w…

I'm very pro-mask but cases are skyrocketing everywhere, even in countries like France and Italy where masking is the norm. I don't presume to know how to fix the issue, but virologist knew this was going to happen -- it is called seasonal forcing[1]. It's disturbing to me that there are people in the US that dont believe COVID-19 is real (I think you can blame the administration for that), but I'm not sure the spike…

Fixing the issue is easy, even if brutal. Close everything that can be closed.

As the weather turned colder people started staying indoors and the conditions for transmitting the disease turned more favorable. (Eg restaurants, etc.)

Plus after a critical mass regular (intuitive) precautions are not enough. Eg in France restaurants allowed people to dine if they looked okay, and had a mask on while waiting for a table, and while not actually eating.

Clearly this was too lax. (aug 31 https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Masks-in-Paris-r... )

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grocery stores even are employing someone to just stand there and either hand a cheapy surg. mask or tell them to put one on. In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated.[1] The store entrance gate won't open until the automated face scan has seen a mask. Hikvision has a mask and temperature detection system integrated with their face recognition systems.[2] If you already have a face recognit…

> In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated. Having facial recognition everywhere isn't necessarily considered "advanced" in all circles. Technically, perhaps. Ethically? Not so much. Facial recognition could be put everywhere in the US. Its primarily the political, legal, and social culture that prevents it, not the access to sufficient technology.

Software, or a person, could do this without knowing whose face is presented and without keeping records.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, the federal government exists to defend the interests of the states, and resolve disputes between them. Clearly, yes. > it's not meant to be a higher level of authority. The Supremacy Clause fairly explicitly disagrees.

yes, but the supremacy clause applies only to laws written within its (federal) jurisdiction, as enumerated in the constitution (and amendments). the battle there, of course, is how much jurisdiction can be finagled under the interstate commerce clause and the like.

In your opinion, has COVID-19 had any effect on interstate commerce? Or is interstate commerce the same as it was this time last year?

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know stuff has been pretty apocalyptic the past 9 months. In San Jose a normally busy clean commercial street was boarded up on every store front with graffiti on most boards(BLM riots/protests). Trash was everywhere. Everyone was wearing masks. In NYC in April mobile morgue trucks flooded the city as the dead exceeded the capacity of the city's morgues. Drive by some parking lots and see hundreds of cars wai…

This probably somewhat explains why people in rural and suburban areas are quick to dismiss it as a hoax. None of what you seen is present outside of coastal American cities. I vacationed in rural Wisconsin this summer. Felt like every other summer I spent there. I think it was a mistake to lockdown many states in March that didn't really have a large number of infections. They spent 2-3 months lockdown for a virus t…

Agree, its why at the time a national lockdown made little sense(early March/April timeframe). Britain did that and its GDP dropped 20%. Now in the US the virus is running rampant due to increased spread, lower humidity and colder weather so will have to see what Biden does in the coming months but I expect a nationwide mask mandate at the very least and probably 1-2 months of the entire country under a strict lockdown. And this is with a vaccine somewhat widely available.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#477
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the more advanced countries, such as Thailand, this is automated. Having facial recognition everywhere isn't necessarily considered "advanced" in all circles. Technically, perhaps. Ethically? Not so much. Facial recognition could be put everywhere in the US. Its primarily the political, legal, and social culture that prevents it, not the access to sufficient technology.

Software, or a person, could do this without knowing whose face is presented and without keeping records.

That's not enough. Someone standing in front of such a system cannot tell whether records are kept, or shared.

1. One risk is that the government will slowly erode any limitations. In Germany, one of the most privacy oriented countries, restaurants were required to collect contact information. This was announced as being strictly for covid contract tracing purposes. Less than a month later, the police in multiple states were found to have demanded and received access to those lists for reasons entirely unrelated to covid. So any default level of trust has already been betrayed.

2. Another risk is that the vendors themselves might prefer "alternative definitions" of record keeping and data sharing for various reasons (e.g. processing in the cloud and/or by third-party companies with even less restrictions, data collection for ML training purposes, selling the same dataset for profit, "flagged as hidden" vs "never actually stored", "stored to persistent media then deleted" vs "never persistently stored", preventing access by contractual/legal vs technical means...). The people making such promises are never ever the engineers that actually understand their system. And similar to the previous paragraph, companies have every incentive to slowly erode any guarantees they might've actually met at some point.

3. The people buying the products (shop owners) as a general rule have neither the expertise, time, motivation nor source code level access to call the vendors out.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the first things Trump said about SARS-CoV-2 is that it was a 'Democratic' 'hoax.' How do you focus on educating against that, when any contradiction of Trump will be seen by his followers as a purely political act? People wouldn't believe the virus is hoax if they hadn't been told it was a hoax, and that's absolutely not a 'both sides bad' issue.

>One of the first things Trump said about SARS-CoV-2 is that it was a 'Democratic' 'hoax.'

No, Trump did not say that. Trump said that Democratic criticism of his administration's response to COVID19 was a hoax, comparing it to the Russian and impeachment "hoaxes".

>How do you focus on educating against that, when any contradiction of Trump will be seen by his followers as a purely political act?

How do you focus on educating against that, when this is about the simplest slur to disprove? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-biden-ad-...

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but the supremacy clause applies only to laws written within its (federal) jurisdiction, as enumerated in the constitution (and amendments). the battle there, of course, is how much jurisdiction can be finagled under the interstate commerce clause and the like.

In your opinion, has COVID-19 had any effect on interstate commerce? Or is interstate commerce the same as it was this time last year?

all commerce, including the interstate kind, has slowed down due to the pandemic response, but that certainly doesn't mean that the interstate commerce clause should be invoked for covid (or in many other cases that it has been employed by the federal gov't). that power should be reserved for things like collusive, coercive, and anti-competitive behavior, its intended purpose.

for epidemiological concerns, the public health services act is the relevant federal legal framework, as @dragonwriter mentioned elsewhere.

however, a national mask mandate is a political ploy unlikely to lower infection rates materially vs. less visible and harder-to-enforce mitigations. it's polarized pangeantry, being pushed to put some points on the political board and coalesce power. anyone who cares about getting past the pandemic should punish such ineffective partisan behavior in favor of real meaningful, targeted, and effective measures--start with focusing on private social gatherings, the primary vector of spread (and completely unrelated to interstate commerce), not meaningless public displays of compliance.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.

I'll bite sure. Covid is not that bad. Statistically unless you are very sick and/or very elderly, you are extremely likely to not die. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8 Deaths were almost entirely in the 60-80+ years old range. When your that old dying is sad, but inevitable. I'm extremely glad that we don't have an actually dangerous pandemic that effects a wider span of the population.

Sounds like you're coming at this in good faith so thanks!

OK, so your paper only takes about mortality. It's a good point that a low percentage of people die from this. Great news. However there's growing evidence pointing to long-term health problems for survivors. Elevated risk of stroke even among young people, heart damage, and long lasting respiratory problems. Since the disease is new, we don't really know the long lasting effects yet. Maybe they will go away after years, we'll see. My neighbor had it and still struggles to breathe and has that widely-described "mind haze" many months later. Point is you can't just look at death rate.

But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you personally are fortunately in the group that won't experience any of these problems. How do you know that everyone you encounter are also in that lucky group? Same for the people they encounter after they encounter you? You don't, and by not following the basic guidance of staying at home and wearing a mask when you have to go out, you're increasing the likelihood that others you meet catch it, and then either die, have long-lasting health problems, or spread it to others.

Now, let's talk about 60-80+ year olds. "They're gonna die anyway so..." So, what, exactly? Increase their chances of dying because we don't want to close Starbucks? I don't think I can really even put myself in the shoes of someone making this argument. Almost everyone has someone in their family or acquaintances in this age range. A mother or grandfather. Maybe a teacher. I don't think you're really saying downplay the virus even if it throws these loved ones under the bus. If this was the year 2060 and you were in this age range (I'm assuming), would you still make this argument?

One thing we can agree on: We're glad it's not more deadly than it is. If COVID were 10x deadlier, or affected people uniformly across age ranges, or if it were 10x more transmissive, we would have been in a world of shit, because people evidently don't have the character to make small uncomfortable sacrifices for the greater good. Even with a 10x worse COVID, we would have just kept insisting on going shopping and partying and accepting more people dying. Which is appalling, really.

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